Chandigarh, April 12
While Nestle India, one of the biggest private companies in milk business in Punjab, has started encouraging dairy farmers to shift from buffaloes to cows, Milkfed, Punjab’s cooperative and flag bearer in milk products, is still indecisive.

Only yesterday, a delegation of the North India Dairy Farmers Welfare Association met Milkfed chairman Gurbachan Singh Babehalli to demand encouragement to cow milk.

Nestle India procures nearly one million litres of both buffalo and cow milk from about one lakh farmers for its milk district of Moga. In fact Nestle India is consciously encouraging milk farmers to shift from buffalo to cow milk, even though the people still prefer buffalo milk, which is costlier.

Milkfed, for example, still buys cow milk at Rs 9 a litre and pays Rs 14.50 a litre for buffalo milk. Compared to Nestle, Milkfed buys more than four times cow and buffalo milk in Punjab.

It is intriguing that one litre of mineral water sells for Rs 12 and cow milk for Rs 9.

Dairy farmers insist that the procurement price of cow milk was a deterrent in encouraging cow farming. While the maintenance cost of a cow and a buffalo comes to almost the same, farmers opt for buffalo.

Milkfed does not market cow milk. Instead, it mixes buffalo and cow milk and sells it from Rs 16 to Rs 20 a litre depending upon its fat content.

Cow milk is healthier and suitable for human consumption for more than one reasons, says Kulwant Singh Kler, president of the Dairy Farmers Welfare Association.

While fat content in human milk varies between 2.8 and 3.5 per cent, it is almost the same in cow’s milk. In Holland, says Kler, the sale of milk with more than 2.8 per cent fat is prohibited.

Further, while most of buffalo farmers use oxtoxin injections for milking their milch cattle, no such injections are used in case of cows.

Studies have shown that the ingredients of highly injurious toxins injected into buffalo get into the milk. Kler maintains that on an average the cost of maintaining a cow comes to Rs 125 a day, which includes cost of fodder, husk, medicines, and cattle feed. In case of buffalo it comes to Rs 140 to Rs 150 a day.

Dairy farmers also want that ban on the export of milk powder should be lifted immediately.